This paper studies the role of imagery in program comprehension. With this goal we investigated whether theories of mental models from Psychology of Programming (e.g., Pennington’s Two Stages Theory) could be expanded to account for the effect of imagery. Given the basic research in image processing, our hypothesis is that imagery would allow a quicker access to the functional (Data Flow) infor...

In French, regardless of stem regularity, inflectional verbal suffixes are extremely regular and paradigmatic. Considering the complexity of the French verbal system, we argue that all French verbs are polymorphemic forms that are decomposed during visual recognition independently of their stem regularity. We conducted a behavioral experiment in which we manipulated the surface and cumulative f...

This article investigates the relationship between visual mental representations and spatial mental representations in human visuo-spatial processing. By comparing two common theories of visuo-spatial processing - mental model theory and the theory of mental imagery - we identified two open questions: (1) which representations are modality-specific, and (2) what is the role of the two represent...

Action observation training and motor imagery training have independently been studied and considered as an effective training strategy for improving motor skill learning. However, comparative studies of the two training strategies are relatively few. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of action observation training and motor imagery training on the development of mental r...

The purpose of the present study was to seek evidence that mental rotation is accomplished by transforming a representation held in visual short-term memory (VSTM). In order to accomplish this goal, we utilized the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN), an electrophysiological index of the maintenance of information in VSTM. We hypothesized that if mental rotation is accomplished ...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical justification for, and describe an implementation of, instance-based cognitive mining (ICM), a process that analyzes multiple decision instances using the inductive learning algorithms of artificial intelligence to generate a mathematical representation of the decision maker’s mental models, explicitly relating how the decision maker implici...

BACKGROUND Complicated grief is increasingly recognized as a debilitating disorder with significant mental and health consequences. The underlying mechanisms of complicated grief remain unclear, however. In the present study, we investigated a specific mechanism of complicated grief (CG) derived from attachment theory: the accessibility of the deceased's mental representation under threat. ME...

The operational momentum (OM) effect describes a cognitive bias whereby we overestimate the results of mental addition problems while underestimating for subtraction. To test whether the OM emerges from psychophysical characteristics of the mental magnitude representation we measured two basic parameters (Weber fraction and numerical estimation accuracy) characterizing the mental magnitude repr...

In cognitive robotics we look for the representation of consciousness, which is based on the ability to reproduce mental states. In this presentation we discuss the principles for consciousness reproducibility, namely representation, the resolution levels of experience and the space of experience. We conclude with a tale that is a metaphore of our mental and scientific equipment to face robotic...

There are many facets to mental life and mental experience. In this chapter, I attempt to account for some central characteristics among those facets. I argue that normative function and representation are emergent in particular forms of the self-maintenance of far from thermodynamic equilibrium systems in their essential far-from-equilibrium conditions. The nature of representation that is the...